A Story Told in Ink: Some Flash…

A Story Told in Ink: Some Flash…

JMAW for 434 Tattoo

A year ago to the day that Tattoo Adam put the wolf on me, I started my three-quarter sleeve (which knowing me will end up as a full-sleeve) with some Tattoo Flash from a tattoo parlor in New Orleans just outside the French Quarter, Electric Ladyland.  I didn’t know I would work into a sleeve nor intend it at the time, but that’s how life works, sometimes a little too smoothly, a little too eerily, but it works nonetheless…

I was picking up the pieces of my life and that piece of flash was to be a symbol of rebirth, I realized that I was a work in progress, much like ‘Nola, the city who stole a piece of my Heart, that place along the Mississippi still in her rebirth, even years after Katrina ran through it, which disrupted business as usual then and ever since.  But that’s life, it’s the grit, it’s the grime, and it’s all beautiful if you really look at it.

“My tattoos on the back of my hands, they mean alot of different things, but they are powerful, and I believe in them.  A monk at the Tiger Temple, tattooed from head to toe put them on me.”  Adam had said to me the day earlier and even the first time he had spoken to me about spirituality and tattoos.  So much has happened in both our lives since my first session with him, now ten months ago.  It’s funny because his son was a newborn when we met, now he was almost a year old.  A lot can happen in life in a year, and certainly both within and outside a tattoo shop.

“The other day, this dude came in, he had all these spiritual tattoos and they were so far just symbolic of his past.  He was telling me that the next ones were going to tell the story of his future.  It gave me chicken skin.”  Adam continued.  It was funny/eerie because though the wolf appeared on my arm in a dream from my past, was confirmed by a woman who saw it on my arm before any of the sleeve save for the flash was even conceived,  the wolf was there to symbolize my present and lead me towards the future. Adam placed the wolf three times before he was pleased, the wolf was already there and we were both just playing a part it would seem…

“There are many forms of medicine.  Tattoos can be one of them…” Adam has told me during more than one of our custom tattoo and talk story sessions. I agree.

I’ve written this before and will do so again: I spent three years with politicians, and now just over one with tattoo artists, and tattoo people are definitely more my type of people because if anything, the only flash is on the walls, you know what you get when you pick it, and its honest throughout the whole nine yards…